of the Baroness de la Cour. She took
pity on it, tended it, taught it not to be afraid of her and to stay in
her room. So touching was her conduct considered by some of those who
heard it, that she was nicknamed "the Charmer." But she is well aware,
she writes to her sister, that with the true ingratitude of the male,
the pigeon will leave her as soon as it needs her help no longer.

However, for the moment, "disfigured as it is, beautiful or ugly," she
loves it. "Don't forget," she writes, "that a woman who is practical and
foreseeing, she too enjoys her pigeon shooting, but the birds are her
lovers."

Shortly after she left Vittel an event occurred which afforded Jeanne de
la Cour the prospect of acquiring that settled position in life which,
"practical and foreseeing," she now regarded as indispensable to her
future welfare. Her husband, Gras, died, as she had foretold, in the
Charity Hospital. The widow was free. If she could bring down her bird,
it was now in her power to make it hers for life. Henceforth all her
efforts were directed to that end. She was reaching her fortieth year,
her hair was turning grey, her charms were waning. Poverty, degradation,
a miserable old age, a return to the wretched surroundings of her
childhood, such she knew to be the fate of many of her kind. There was
nothing to be hoped for from the generosity of men. Her lovers were
leaving her. Blackmail, speculation on the Bourse, even the desperate
expedient of a supposititious child, all these she tried as means of
acquiring a competence. But fortune was shy of the widow. There was
need for dispatch. The time was drawing near when it might be man's
unkind privilege to put her scornfully aside as a thing spent and done
with. She must bring down her bird, and that quickly. It was at this
critical point in the widow's career, in the year 1873, that she met at
a public ball for the first time Georges de Saint Pierre.(16)

(16) For obvious reasons I have suppressed the real name of the widow's
lover.

Georges de Saint Pierre was twenty years of age when he made the
acquaintance of the Widow Gras. He had lost his mother at an early age,
and since then lived with relatives in the country. He was a young man
of independent means, idle, of a simple, confiding and affectionate
disposition. Four months after his first meeting with the widow they
met again. The end of the year 1873 saw the commencement of an intimacy,
which to all appea